Word: british
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Midge Costanza, feminist and ex-White House aide, on the British election: "I myself am a liberal, and Margaret Thatcher is conservative. But we've all been run by men whose philosophy we don't agree with. Why not a woman...
During the 18th century, the English had to pay taxes on the windows in their houses. When another kind of window tax was proposed in Hartford, Conn., last year, the good citizens responded enthusiastically. The beneficiary of the revenue, after all, was not the British war chest but a restoration fund for the nation's oldest statehouse, a building that dates back to 1796. The method of taxation was unorthodox: $5 for every window with a view of the historic building...
...fossil bones and teeth were not, in fact, the first fragments found in the area. During the 1920s, before Burma broke away from British domination and became an independent country, scientists found similar specimens. The fossils were poorly preserved, but they seemed to represent two slightly differing kinds of primates that were named Pondaungia and Amphipithecus, and their discovery persuaded some anthropologists that the roots of the higher primates lay in Asia. Of the new fragments, all but one have been matched with the original finds...
...least erotic whorehouse sequences ever recorded in an R-rated film. Unlike Novelist Theroux, Bogdanovich does not have a particularly keen descriptive eye; he goes for tourist snapshots instead of true grit. Except for Denholm Elliott, who offers a fastidious portrait of a typically down-and-out British colonial, the actors do little to help the proceedings. Gazzara is fairly blameless, given his flat role, but the miscasting of his con-man nemesis is a disaster. Had a strong actor played the villain, who recalls Harry Lime in The Third Man, Saint Jack might have had some tension and dramatic...
...plight of U.S. passenger travel is downright humiliating when it is compared with the superb services of, say, Japan, France and Britain. British trains run so close to the mark that passengers carp about a five-minute overdue arrival. Japan's celebrated bullet trains, at up to 130 m.p.h., make the U.S. counterparts seem like earthworms. Naturally such service does not come free. Britain subsidizes its trains at a yearly rate of $728 million, Japan (with less than half the U.S. track mileage) at $4.1 billion and France at $930 million...